The Gaming Den

Fun fact: during the 70's and 80's there were a relative fuckton of terror attacks perpetrated by far-right Jewish radicals. Clearly, the modern Republican has been very soured on Israel as a res- BAHAHAHAHA.

No, OS is just being a dumbass as usual. The Republican's anti-immigration policy is meant to appeal to racists (who hate Mexicans) and fundamentalists (who hate Muslims) and also beat the wardrum for whatever invasion they want to launch next (because we're in constant danger, you see - you can tell because we won't stop talking about it, no matter how bullshit it is, and if we don't do something now The Enemy is just going to keep sending terrorists across our borders!).

I shouldn't be shocked, but I am to see the Republicans fighting so hard for policies that have counter-examples shining directly in their faces. At the same time that they're moving to relax regulation on clean water, there's Flint. And they're calling for war-mongering tactics against Iran when diplomacy saved the sailors (and the US a lot of money). They're crazy.

Maj wrote:I shouldn't be shocked, but I am to see the Republicans fighting so hard for policies that have counter-examples shining directly in their faces. At the same time that they're moving to relax regulation on clean water, there's Flint. And they're calling for war-mongering tactics against Iran when diplomacy saved the sailors (and the US a lot of money). They're crazy.

Iran makes sense, at least.

They're assuming that Iran is going to use this deal to continue their nuclear program covertly and will eventually get the bomb. They don't trust Iran's leaders and the sailor thing doesn't change that.

With Flint, well, the Michigal Department of Environmental Quality signed off on Flint's water treatment plan, and gave false data saying that it would be safe. So that's a huge black mark on environmental regulatory agencies.

On the flip side, the MDEQ is essentially an arm of the governor's office, and behind the scenes the MDEQ and the EPA were in a six month long legal cold war over this.

The truth behind Flint is that the very Republican executive branch of the state pushed cost-cutting, safety be damned, going so far as to be willing to falsify data and threaten to fight the EPA in court over it. It's less an example of regulatory capture and more an example of "this is what your country looks like on Republicans. Don't do Republicans, kids." If you put people who are ideologically opposed to regulation in charge of a regulatory agency, you get lead in your drinking water.

Maj wrote:I shouldn't be shocked, but I am to see the Republicans fighting so hard for policies that have counter-examples shining directly in their faces. At the same time that they're moving to relax regulation on clean water, there's Flint.

It was nice to hear Sanders call for Snyder's resignation during the debate on Sunday. Not that I expect it will do anything, but I'm glad people outside of Michigan are finally talking about it.

DSMatticus wrote:On the flip side, the MDEQ is essentially an arm of the governor's office, and behind the scenes the MDEQ and the EPA were in a six month long legal cold war over this.

The truth behind Flint is that the very Republican executive branch of the state pushed cost-cutting, safety be damned, going so far as to be willing to falsify data and threaten to fight the EPA in court over it. It's less an example of regulatory capture and more an example of "this is what your country looks like on Republicans. Don't do Republicans, kids." If you put people who are ideologically opposed to regulation in charge of a regulatory agency, you get lead in your drinking water.

The fact remains, that this was a government fuckup. The government ran the water treatment plant. Incompetent government employees made cost-cutting decisions to treat the water with lime instead of using chemicals that would actually work. Government employees at the DEQ falsified test results. So really, it's easy to blame the the situation on the government.

hyzmarca wrote:The fact remains, that this was a government fuckup. The government ran the water treatment plant. Incompetent government employees made cost-cutting decisions to treat the water with lime instead of using chemicals that would actually work. Government employees at the DEQ falsified test results. So really, it's easy to blame the the situation on the government.

The fact remains, that when Republicans fuck up, it means we shouldn't elect Democrats, and should instead elect more Republicans.

THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NO WAY THIS CAN BACKFIRE!

No really, the Republicans have been running an official strategy of deliberately crippling and screwing up government agencies in order to convince people that they need less government for 40 years. Maybe it's time to pretend you can see through their incredibly childish ploy hyzmarca

The only way to prevent the government from poisoning its citizens is to remove the government.

Duh.

Sounds smart to me, there is no way removing all government can backfire. It worked in Mad Max, after all.

Damnit, Count, don't make it sound so convincing.

I'm willing to accept any amount of poverty and random, unpredictable violent death if it means that converting trucks into tanks while wearing bondage gear will become a respectable profession.

It's difficult to blame the crisis in Flint on "the government." It'd be sort of like blaming Watergate on "the government" - technically true, in that the person responsible was a government official, but very misleading, because what they did was absolutely not done with any respect for the limits of their office or even the law. It's an example of people in government very deliberately overstepping the bounds of their authority and daring someone to catch and stop them.

So let's talk about Flint. If you hadn't heard, we had a little bit of a recession a little while back. The budgets of local governments have not been unaffected, and Michigan in particular has used this as an opportunity to install "emergency managers" to oversee (read: replace) various local governments. It'd be sort of like declaring that because Mississippi needs so much more money from the federal government than it pays back, Mississippi gets to have a shiny new Lord Overseer appointed by the president, and that Lord Overseer gets to keep the governor's and state legislature's balls in a vice (just incase he ever has to make a persuasive argument for why they should shut the fuck up and do what he says). It's actually very similar to what the EU has done to Greece. "Your finances are in tatters, so we're sending you to your room without dessert democracy." I would like to point out that the last time an emergency manager law went to the ballot, the voters of Michigan set it on fucking fire. Rick Snyder passed one anyway. Not entirely sure how that worked out for him, and too lazy to google it. But the point is that everything about this entire fucking process is both frighteningly undemocratic and probably illegitimate.

The decision to create and fund the Karegnondi Water Authority seems to have been first made by the Flint city government with only minimal coercion. And it really wasn't a bad decision - Detroit Water was fucking them in the ass, and every year there was a little less lube than the last. By the time Flint stopped using Detroit Water, they were paying one-fifth of its costs but only using about one-tenth of its output. Next year's rates were going to be even less favorable. Part of that is simple geography, but the other part is simple "fuck you give me money."

Here's where everything goes wrong. Detroit's emergency manager, Kevyn Orr, realizes that the KWA will take longer than a year to complete, but that they only have to provide a year's notice in order to cancel their contract with Flint. Kevyn Orr immediately sends notice that they will be cancelling their contract. The plan is simple: if Flint has already decided that they won't allow themselves to be milked a little bit at a time over decades, Kevyn Orr is going to milk the fuck out of them in the little time he has left. He is going to use the gap between the contract ending and the completion of the KWA to force them into a short-term contract at absolutely ridiculous fucking rates.

Flint's former emergency manager, Michael Brown, thought this seemed like a raw enough deal to look for a temporary solution that didn't involve Detroit. How about the Flint river? And that's about as far as he got before he was replaced by Darnell Earley. Darnell Earley is not the one who decided to make the switch to the Flint river, but he is the one who executed it - with the assistance and oversight of the MDEQ. You know, the MDEQ which ultimately falsified data in order to avoid being forced to take action about all the lead they were pumping into Flint residents. The MDEQ's who head is a governor-appointee, exactly like the two emergency managers who created this clusterfuck. The MDEQ which responded to complaints from the EPA with "nuh-uh, wanna fight about it?"

The Flint water crisis is a story about unelected officials acting out of greed and negligence, and then committing actual crimes to cover up all the damage their greed and negligence had caused. You can certainly blame that on the government, but if you're going to do so I feel it's important to specify that the government in question is in fact illegitimate. The people of Detroit and Flint did not choose the emergency managers who "guided" them through into this crisis, and back when they were running their own affairs they managed not to poison their people just fine. But surprise surprise, you make your leaders unaccountable and they immediately start shitting on you.

Trump is saying he won't go to the final GOP debate before the Iowa caucus

The debate is hosted by Fox, and Trump whines that he is treated unfairly by Megan Kelly. Now, I guess this isn't the first time he's threatened to not show up to a debate, but he has scheduled a competing event. He's bragging "lets see how much money Fox makes without me in the debate".

Given how his past performances haven't really changed his polling one way or the other, I'm curious if this will have any actual affect on his national polling. He's already claimed he could shoot someone in Manhattan and not change his polling numbers, and I think he's mostly right.

Iowa results are in.

Ted Cruz wins (barely), with the delegates split between the other top six (Trump, Carson, Rubio, Paul, and Bush). It's actually amazing that Bush got less percentage than Rand Paul. That's got to bite. Also, Huckabee quit, not that that means much.

Meanwhile, Clinton and Sanders are neck and neck.

Considering how many ways the delegates were split, I wouldn't say a lead of 4 percentage points is "barely" -but that might be wishful thinking on my part.

I'm hoping Ted Cruz gets the nomination and Hillary kicks his ass.

Sanders' demographics make Iowa pretty favorable for him. Being able to get merely a statistical tie against Hillary in one of the whitest states in America is a pretty poor showing. He'll do better in New Hampshire, because in addition to being crazy white it's also his home territory of the Northeast. That means we expect Bernie Sanders to outright win in New Hampshire. So people will be talking about Bernie momentum after the first primary, but from a practical standpoint Hillary has basically already won the nomination. The next couple of states are a lot worse for Sanders than for Hillary. After New Hampshire we go to South Carolina, where the Democrats are much blacker, southern, and centrist than they are in Iowa or New Hampshire. Clinton is up by 30 points in South Carolina.

On the Republican side, very little happened. Without an Iowa win, religious nutjob Cruz had no path to the presidency. With an Iowa win, his position is unchanged. The establishment tried to strangle Cruz's candidacy in its crib in Iowa and they failed. Trump was prepared for a second place finish in Iowa, and he's going to win New Hampshire easily. So no change there. The big story is a strong showing for Rubio, who came in a close third. That suggests that the establishment is going to try to rally around Rubio (if he continues to do well in New Hampshire) - but the fact remains that Cruz + Trump still got more than half the votes and 9.3% went to fucking Carson.

So the Republicans are looking at a three man race after New Hampshire, with Cruz, Trump, and "Probably Rubio, almost certainly not Bush" as the three combatants. Still hoping for a brokered convention. Difficult for that to happen, because the establishment straight up gives itself a bunch of delegates because there are a bunch of delegates that are from the party leadership and not appointed by vote results. Specifically, 168 of the 2472 delegates are members of the RNC who can vote for whoever they want, which would presumably be whoever the Republican establishment tells them to. If Rubio continues to be the establishment face, then he straight up won Iowa because Cruz got 8 delegates, Rubio got 7 from the popular vote, and the 3 RNC delegates make 10.

-Username17

To be honest, Rubio would be the best nominee from a "sanity of the Republican party" perspective, but he's still a Republican so my main priority is that the guy in the red corner is someone who will lose to Hillary (and isn't Trump because the fact that that man hasn't already been laughed out of the building makes me want to kill something.)

Longterm, my favorite scenario is one in which Rubio ends up with like 30-40% of the vote (a clear 2nd to Trump at 45%) but gets enough delegates to win on the second vote. So all the Bush and Kasich delegates and shit switch to Rubio after their mandatory vote and the unelected RNC delegates pile on and Rubio is crowned "for no reason." I think that might be an event that not only breaks the back of the Republicans in this election, but causes the Teabaggers to actually try to make their own party be a real thing and run candidates in 2018, splitting the crazy hat vote and giving Hillary a majority in congress for the second half of her first term.

-Username17

FrankTrollman wrote:Longterm, my favorite scenario is one in which Rubio ends up with like 30-40% of the vote (a clear 2nd to Trump at 45%) but gets enough delegates to win on the second vote. So all the Bush and Kasich delegates and shit switch to Rubio after their mandatory vote and the unelected RNC delegates pile on and Rubio is crowned "for no reason." I think that might be an event that not only breaks the back of the Republicans in this election, but causes the Teabaggers to actually try to make their own party be a real thing and run candidates in 2018, splitting the crazy hat vote and giving Hillary a majority in congress for the second half of her first term.

-Username17

I could see something similar happening with Cruz int he place of Trump. While Cruz is a better fit for the establishment ideologically, if all the press is to be believed it appears that something like 90% of the establishment hates him personally.

Regardless, with Rubio's relatively strong showing in Ohio and potentially a number of additional drop-outs after New Hampshire by Bush, Kasich, and Christie (and at some point Rand Paul, who needs to go back to Kentucky and campaign to retain his senate seat) I think the three man race can continue for a while, especially if Trump restores his mojo through a significant win in New Hampshire.

I suspect that Sanders tying in Iowa means he loses long-term, but it's a tough call. Iowa's demographics favor him, but the caucus system does not. More importantly, primary campaigns are somewhat responsive to performance in earlier votes and getting official wins on the board may give Sanders a boost.

Tying in Iowa isn't a win though. For that to happen he will at least have to win convincingly in New Hampshire, and that seems unlikely.

name_here wrote:I suspect that Sanders tying in Iowa means he loses long-term, but it's a tough call.

No. It's not.

But don't take my word for it ask the bookies.

Josh_Kablack wrote:

name_here wrote:I suspect that Sanders tying in Iowa means he loses long-term, but it's a tough call.

No. It's not.

But don't take my word for it ask the bookies.

...what am I looking at here? By which I mean, what do those numbers mean precisely?

Bet $5 on Hillary to become the nominee, and you can win $1 if she does. Bet $2 on Bernie to become the nominee, and you can win $7 if he does.